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This sucks. You can’t bring a battery through security (as carry-on luggage) unless it’s powering a device. So that eliminates replacement batteries for a device you aren’t carrying with you. And you can’t take a lithium battery as checked luggage in passenger aircraft. Period.

Nor does there appear to be any way (for a consumer) to ship stuff here on a genuine cargo plane.

Despite its undeniable convenience, I dislike Apple’s “App Store” for several reasons. The first is that Apple uses it to make developers dance to whatever tune Apple is playing that day. (This is part of their general philosophy of totalitarian control of everything, everywhere.) As a former developer myself, my attitude is “Screw them.”

But the other reason is that it sometimes breaks, and then the recovery mechanism is utterly opaque. Case in point.

This was the fourth time I downloaded 1.20 GB of Garageband content only to receive this useful message:

I don’t know who the intern was who coded this feature into the App Store, but they should have run this diagnostic message past someone who can speak English.

And it probably warrants a RAM upgrade as well. That will cost about $75.

And why not replace the Superdrive with a second hard drive, like a 2 TB drive that costs $85? But it would also require a caddy for the hard drive at about $35. (Or this other caddy at just $25? Without more study, I’m not sure what the difference is. Update: the difference is a $10 “fix kit” with various tools and parts. Also, they say there’s a limit of 750 GB capacity for the second drive.)

I could probably shave off some of that buying the RAM on eBay or whatever, but barring some real bargains, the minimum to get it running is $30+100=$130. The “wish list” adds another $75+85+35 = $195, assuming my labor and tools are free. Plus S+H, of course.

Speaking of which, the old computer isn’t here. It’s in Michigan, and getting it here will cost $60–90, depending on the breaks.

Sigh. This is why I’m thinking about it.

To be fair, it would be a pretty fair computer when I’m done. Unlike recent Macs, it will have expansion ports. But it won’t run High Sierra. Not sure if that’s a bug or a feature.

The best competitor for it available today is the Macbook Air. That’s getting long in the tooth and will probably be eliminated or turned into something much less attractive, like the Macbook. But right now, it has 8 GB and an SSD to start, and 2 USB3 ports and a Thunderbolt 2 port. It weighs 3 lbs. vs. the MBP’s 5, and has slightly better screen resolution. But it costs $999 and up. A Macbook Pro starts at $1299 and has only two Thunderbolt (3) ports, and lacks a separate power socket and SDHC slot; in fact its only real advantage is more screen resolution.

If only Apple would make a MacBook Pro in 2018 as good as the 2009 one was. But that’s an non-starter, since it would require Apple not to suck.

UPDATE: Consider using an SD card instead of a replacing the SuperDrive with a high-capacity hard drive. According to Apple, the MacBook Pro’s card slot supports major SD formats: SD (2 GB max. cap.), SDHC (32 GB), and SDXC (2 TB). It’s a USB device, so it would be a lot slower than a real SSD, but for bulky items that change rarely it should be adequate.

Some time ago, we bought three HP laptops. One had a failure we were never able to resolve, and another was replaced by an ASUS desktop. The last was decommissioned back in January. So I decided to try installing the most recent Ubuntu 18.04LTS on one of them. Here’s my notes from the process.

A year ago, I wouldn’t have guessed that they could make iTunes worse. But they did. They took out useful things (like managing the apps with a mouse rather than a fingertip, and managing the order of screens). To be sure, it was always a crappy interface, more interested in showing you pictures than giving you useful data, or, better yet, a grid-based sortable interface. But that’s iTunes for you. Now it’s worse.

Obviously, there’s nobody at Apple who has more than a dozen apps on their phone. Or more likely, they’ve got some secret tool that the general public can’t use.

Oh, but they did tart up the app store (both the Mac and iOS versions) so you have to wade through commercials every time you use it. Want to find how monumentally huge that iMovie update you don’t want will be? It used to be on the first screen, but now it’s helpfully like four screens deep.

I clobbered my dual-boot laptop. I ought to have clobbered it long ago, so it was uni-boot Linux, but that whole secure-boot UEFI firmware business scared me too much to do that without knowing more, and who has time to learn more, or a test-bed on which to make mistakes.

I was running Ubuntu 17.10 for awhile, but [I made, over a period of two months, a long list of trivial changes that made me decide the simplest thing would be if] I decided to reinstall the OS. And that didn’t work. Or, it sorta kinda worked once or twice, then quit working completely.

Did I run into the Ubuntu BIOS bug? I don’t know. But I was installing Ubuntu and I couldn’t get past the BIOS. So maybe I did. But I don’t know.

It shouldn’t be this hard, Konica: your “self help” website is a mess. It looks like it entered a time vortex in 1998. Compare with, say, Amazon or Facebook. (Separate question, why would someone go to your “self help” site, unless they thought a few hours fighting the web site would take less time than calling for phone support?)

But what do you do when that doesn’t work? Is this because I’m using 10.12 a/k/a Sierra? (Surely, you realize that’s already a full version back, and you barely support it. What would happen if I upgraded to High Sierra?)

Okay, the second time through, following the obvious links got me to this place (Self Help Product Support, which looks like it did before, more or less), but this time when I entered Bizhub C284 in the dark blue box on the left, I got some differentoptions, so I picked them.)

And it worked! Total time (including writing this blog post in real-time as I went along) was about 35 minutes.

I just discovered MiniMagick. It is exactly what I was looking for in a ruby-language wrapper for ImageMagick.

I’ve been using ImageMagick forever. Like, more than 20 years foreer. Maybe 30 years; I don’t know when it was first developed, or how old it was when I discovered it.

Some of the time, I use ImageMagick from the command line: just convert a file or montage a couple of them, or whatever. But sometimes, I do the same three things to an image and expect to do it over and over again for multiple images, I’ll write a shell script.

Writing shell scripts is hard. (Like, do you use trap? Of course you don’t.)

Writing Ruby is easy. But the only Ruby wrapper for ImageMagick I knew about was RMagick, which is big and complex and the first couple of times I tried to use it I had build problems (this was back before gems and github).

So there I was. Use bash and keep it simple, or use ruby with some crazy backtick `convert foo.png foo.jpg` shell escape there instead of doing it right.

But MiniMagick is just a well-designed wrapper around those backticks. Kudos!